"Karski Karma": The Jan Karski US National Centennial Campaign Kicks off with Inaugural Dinner at the Polish Consulate

The goal of the campaign is to focus attention on a great humanitarian whose 100th birthday is approaching in April 2014. The culmination of the US campaign is to honor Karski – a native of Poland, a naturalized American and an honorary citizen of Israel – with the Congressional Gold Medal, America’s highest civilian honor in recognition of his lifetime achievement.
 
“We want to shine light on this remarkable man of integrity, action and courage,” said Andrzej Rojek, one of the founding members of the Jan Karski US National Centennial Committee. “We call him ‘Humanity’s hero.’ ” Karski, who was a professor at Georgetown University School of Foreign Serivce for 40 years from 1953 until his retirement in 1992, was remembered by former Georgetown President Father Leo J. O’Donovan, S.J., his students and friends.
 
“This was a remarkable man, a devout Roman Catholic who never talked about his personal sacrifices and the courage with which he acted as a courier,” said Fr. O’Donovan.  “After he lost everything in the war, including his country, Georgetown became his home.”
 
After the elegant, kick-off dinner at the Consulate, which is housed in the French Baroque De Lamar Mansion at the aptly named Jan Karski Corner at Madison Avenue and 37th Street, David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), said that Karski was a hero of the Jewish people: “In a time when heroes are few and far between, Karski’s example shines.” Harris met and befriended Karski in the 1980s at Jewish-Polish encounters. After Karski’s death, the AJC established an award named for Karski. “Truth be told, we have a hard time finding people on whom we can confer this honor, who rise to his level of moral and physical courage and can, if you will, stand next to him,” Harris noted.
 
Holocaust survivor Sigmund Rolat, a founding donor for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, said that had Jews like himself who worked in forced labor camps during World War II known about the existence of Jan Karski, “it would have made all the difference. Just knowing that there was a man out speaking for us – someone who cared about us enough to put his life on the line,” he said, “could have helped us get through that brutal time. But even learning about Karski much later, as I did, can help remind us of strong historic bonds between Polish Christians and Polish Jews – bonds that had been frayed during the War. Jan Karski helps lead us to a better future.”
 
“In Poland, Karski’s place in the national pantheon is secure but we need to constantly educate young people about what he stood for,” said Ewa Wierzynska, leader of the Jan Karski Unfinished Mission Program at the Polish History Museum. “Fortunately, his story is so incredibly capitvating and he left us such powerful testimonies on tape and in print, that we have a veritable treasure trove.”
 
Beyond the Congressional Medal, the Karski campaign includes cultural, and educational activities introducing his work and life into history and Holocaust curriculums in the US. “I like calling it ‘Karski karma,’ ” said Robert Billingsley, one of the founding members of the committee who was also a student of Karski’s in the 1960s. “Whenever I mention Karski’s name, it carries a kind of magic with it and doors open.”

In addition to Billingsley, Wierzynska, Rojek, Rolat and Consul General Junczyk-Ziomecka, founding members of the Jan Karski US National Centennial Campaign include Wanda Urbanska, campaign director; Michael Berkowicz, treasurer of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and Alex Storozynski, president and executive director of Kosciuszko Foundation.
 
“Jan Karski would have been proud of this diverse gathering of Poles, Americans, Christians and Jews,” said Consul General Junczyk-Ziomecka, “working together to foster the values of individual responsibility and human solidarity.”
 
For more information about the campaign or to make a contribution, please go to www.jankarski.net or email info@jankarski.net, attention Wanda Urbanska.

BIOGRAPHY: Jan Karski: Humanity’s Hero, 1914 - 2000
Before the outbreak of World War II on September 1, 1939, when the German Nazis invaded Poland, Jan Karski was a Polish reserve officer and a junior diplomat with large ambitions and a bright future. On September 17, 1939, Soviet forces invaded his country from the east, and Karski’s life was sent careening in a new direction. Rounded up along with thousands of Polish officers, policemen and leading citizens from the eastern part of his country, he was being sent to his certain death at Katyn Forest when he managed his first escape. Posing as an enlisted man, he fled Soviet captivity and returned to the German Nazi-occupied part of Poland.

Before long, Karski became a courier for the Polish Underground resistance where he played a large and remarkable role in the struggle for his country, putting his life on the line numerous times. After being tortured by the German Nazis, he attempted suicide, but later continued his mission of smuggling information out of occupied Poland to the Polish Government in Exile, first in France and later in England. On his return trips to occupied Poland, he would return with orders and information for the Underground government. Drawing on his photographic memory, he delivered the Polish Government in Exile’s orders for merging a full-fledged Underground state into the country’s already strong military resistance.

On one of his many courageous missions, an unshaven Karski twice infiltrated Warsaw’s Jewish Ghetto to witness its horrors (including starvation and despair). An especially gruesome spectacle was watching young German Nazi soldiers hunt down Jewish children for sport. Karski subsequently posed as a guard at the Izbica transit camp to witness Jews being herded onto train cars, to be sent to their deaths.

After his final mission from occupied Poland, Karski was ordered to spread the word in the West about what he’d seen. In addition to detailed written reports, he personally delivered his eyewitness account – and urgent appeal for intervention – to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and later President Franklin Roosevelt in the White House. He pleaded with both leaders to stop the Holocaust. Sadly, his message largely fell on deaf ears.

In addition to meeting with Roosevelt, he met with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, a close friend of the president. Karski remembers Frankfurter’s reaction: “‘Mr. Karski,’ he says emphatically, ‘A man like me talking to a man like you must be totally frank. So I must say: I am unable to believe in what I have just heard, in all the things that you have just told me.’ ”
Once in America, Karski was assigned by the Polish Government in Exile to write his account. Improbably, his book, Story of a Secret State, was published in 1944 in the United States and became an overnight best-seller, being picked as a Book of the Month Club selection and selling 400,000 copies. This opened the door for Karski to conduct an extensive speaking tour throughout the United States and Canada, influencing public opinion.

Jan Karski US National Centennial Campaign WandaUrbanska@gmail.com Ph 919.706.5972 www.jankarski.net
Born Jan Kozielewski in 1914 in Łódź, Poland, a heterogeneous city composed of Polish Catholics, Polish Jews, Germans and Russians, he was the youngest of eight children in a Roman Catholic family. His father was a leather merchant. Young Karski studied law and diplomacy at the University of Lwów (Lviv).

After the war, choosing to remain in the United States rather than return to Communist Poland, he earned his Ph.D. at Georgetown University, where subsequently he taught in the School of Foreign Service for 40 years. In 1965, he married Pola Nirenska, a Polish Jewish dancer whom he had first seen perform in London in 1938. In yet another tragedy in Karski’s life, his wife took her own life in 1992.

Initially loath to speak about his wartime experiences, wanting to put that horrific chapter behind him, ultimately, he had no choice but to speak out. “I have no other proofs, no photographs,” Karski wrote later in a memoir about witnessing Jews being sent to their deaths. “All I can say is that I saw it, and that it is the truth.” Half a century later, Karski told Maciej Kozlowski, former Polish ambassador to Israel and author of the biography, The Emissary: The Story of Jan Karski. “I spent about an hour in that camp. I came out sick, seized by fits of nausea. I vomited blood. I had seen horrifying things there. Disbelief? You would not believe it yourself, if you saw it.”

In addition to Story of a Secret State, Karski also published The Great Powers and Poland, 1919-1945: From Versailles to Yalta, an insightful analysis of the politics of power. In 1982, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem awarded him the title of a Righteous Among the Nations, and the Israeli government declared him an Honorary Citizen in 1994, as did his native city of Łódź.

According to Kozlowski, “There could hardly be another person who felt more deeply, painfully, and bitterly the expedient abandonment of Poland by the Allies in World War II. Jan Karski was a man who, tragically, had to feel that his own prodigious efforts on behalf of the Jews of Europe - and on behalf of his briefly independent native land - were an utter failure. Regarded as a hero in both Poland and Israel, his was a heroism not of triumphs but of extraordinary integrity and courage.”

Though the large ambitions and bright future of Jan Karski failed to place him on the course that he had imagined as a youth, he ended up playing an enormous role on the world stage, offering lessons to us all. His mission was courageous, his testimony powerful, the moral standards he set for himself and others of the highest order; indisputably he became humanity’s hero.